Donnatella Voss
don't chase girls, don't get too close Donna is cliché in that there are hundreds of thousands of twenty-one year old single mothers with great big dreams and tiny little lives, who have 100 megawatt smiles and a sob story. They break, they reinvent themselves, they move on. Or they don't. don't fuck your best friend Donnatella Marie Duvall was born to Richard and Nancy Duvall in September of 1987, in a town in Texas where the well-to-do couple had settled to enjoy the modest success of Richard's first sci-fi trilogy while he worked on the follow up, hoping to make the Best Sellers list again when the next book came out. Donna was the youngest of three children - her older siblings were Elise Jeanette, the eldest, and her own twin brother Richard Aaron (generally known as 'Aaron' to prevent confusion). She grew up closest to her brother until his untimely death early before their thirteenth birthday of leukaemia. Seeing how badly his family had taken the loss, Mr Duvall made the decision to pack them up and move elsewhere - away from the memories. It seemed to Donna that they were leaving aforementioned memories behind entirely; after her family relocated to Seymour, Aaron was rarely mentioned and most of their new neighbours and friends were unaware there'd ever been a son in the Duvall family. Elise coped by turning to God; Richard coped by turning to long-time 'family friend' Michael Kirkpatrick; Nancy coped by focusing on appearances and drinking earlier and earlier in the afternoons (it's afternoon somewhere, sweetheart!)...and Donna, who felt like she'd lost an entire half of herself, didn't really cope at all. After a childhood spent mostly devoted to science fiction movies, fantasy stories and being close only to her brother, as highschool loomed she made the decision to remake herself. She was missing too much, and, to put not too fine a point on it, she proceeded to wildly overcompensate. Donna wanted to be that girl. You know the one; her skirt is too short, but her hair is perfect and you wish you knew where she was buying her tops. Her shoes look like they could kill a man. Half the student body wants to kick her off a cliff. Half of them would sleep with her anyway and if you listen to the rumours, half of them have. With a child's casual cruelty, Donna reworked herself into an image she'd messily constructed out of magazines and movie screens - nothing like anybody's reality, in other words, but effective. She was the loudest, the friendliest; she knew everybody's name and most of their business. She'd dated him, she knew her secrets, and when she laughed it was like she was screaming. Thoughtlessly callous, immature and undirected. Understandably, this is not sustainable. Eventually, something gives. For Donna, it was her junior English teacher (Gideon Reid). Her social standing nosedived and she was, briefly, kicked out of home. The thirtysomething teacher who'd been carrying on with a girl roughly the same age as his own daughter quietly moved after the painfully obvious evidence of their affair fell apart with an untimely miscarriage. Donna struggled through her junior and senior years of highschool and relied heavily on her father's "best friend", Michael Kirkpatrick, whose daughter was her best friend (relax - no airquotes). The Kirkpatricks gave Donna much-needed stability, and if it came with a thorough education in firearms and what Michael liked to call 'proactive self-defence' - well, girls like Donna, you can't let 'em get bored. Look what happens when they do. Michael (who'd spent some time in and out of prison for relatively minor offences, and had a fondness for weapons that he instilled in his family over delicious pie and lemonade) probably should not have been teaching tiny angry teenage girls the quickest ways to break somebody's nose or cut off their air supply, but the world's an ugly place, Michael and Richard had pretty daughters, and that's about how that went. Throughout her adolescence, Donna had grown closer to her father - Daddy's doted on princess, blatantly favoured wherever it could be gotten away with. Richard wasn't much of a parent (Michael picking up the slack there made it easier all around, if probably not any better), but he was Donna's daddy, and moreover: he needed her. Richard needed somebody reminding him about appointments with the therapist and telling him to take his pills, and someone to be there through the crash periods. Nancy having largely retreated after Aaron's death and the subsequent relocation, and Elise getting out of the house as quickly as possible as soon as she was old enough, these things mostly fell to Donna. So no one could really blame her for being bitterly disappointed in her father when she needed him and he failed to come through for her; Richard didn't say anything when Nancy threw her out, and while she was clambering out of the wreckage of her life, his carefully constructed marriage and stability were beginning to crumble, too. Michael and Isobel were who Donna relied on through her parents' messy separation and divorce; when her father stopped taking his medication and nobody else wanted to deal with his mental illness; when after a string of ill-advised relationships, male and female, she finally met who she'd like to hope was the one, Taylor Voss, and found herself frighteningly in love and, as she half-laughed with not a lot of humour later, "what the hell kind of dumbass gets pregnant twice before she's twenty?" Donna hung on through an unexpected second pregnancy and new relationship, doing what she'd always done: getting up and going on. Richard's illness gave her, again, something to focus on and as they all regained an even keel, she worked on rebuilding a father/daughter bond with the newer, stabler Richard Duvall. Meanwhile, she was moving in with Taylor and planning a wedding around her expanding waistline. She'd never really planned to go to college, but appeased those not really impressed with the idea of a nineteen year old girl playing house with the thought that when the baby was old enough, then she'd go. She talked about studying theatre, maybe, or English. Michael and Richard set their little princess up with a nest egg of sorts and with baby (Sirja Tabitha Duvall Voss, b. 28 Nov 2007) under her arm and big damn dreams under the other, she set off to New York with her new husband, Taylor Voss, who was not quite so extroverted as his tiny, psychotic wife - but loved her in a way significantly less damaging than most of the other relationships in her life had been. Taylor was hit by a drunk driver five months after they settled into their new apartment. The man who'd been behind the wheel paid for the medical bills mostly out of guilt, which was not all that comforting when Donna found herself not yet twenty-one and planning her husband's funeral. It was nice of him to hold her hand and let her scream; she didn't really mean to break it, and he was pretty understanding about that, too. Donna figures at this point she shouldn't talk too much about how much worse it can't get, because there's nothing God likes better than proving you wrong. (She was, after all, raised Catholic - like her sister, Elise, who she hasn't spoken to in a couple years after loudly and repeatedly voicing her violent opposition to Elise's born-again husband, George Ryder and a particularly vicious spat over who Mommy loved best.) Her career path has been as confusing as the rest of her life; she entertained every pretty teenage girl's dream of being a model when she was fifteen, and then discovered that short girls do not get far in the modelling world and exactly how many supermodels are American these days, anyway? She ended up mostly doing temp work between pregnancy and taking care of her father while he got back on his feet. In NYC she made a game attempt at a career as a stage actress, but wasn't getting all that far when Taylor died and sent all her plans into a tailspin. Single parents can't really afford to be starving artists, so Donna found herself, as she would charmingly put it, "between lives". don't be shy, don't shut your eyes A few months after the death of her husband and still living with friends in New York, Donna took a wrong turn out for a walk and ended up in the City, cold and confused with Sirja in tow. Never one to miss an opportunity to network, she established friends and family swiftly, playing some things close to her chest and sharing others freely. Still mourning Taylor and uncertain with how her life would proceed, a place like the City - skating between real and unreal - should've terrified her, but instead she found it a comforting escape. Though she hesitated to admit it to anyone, she actually liked it there, and given the opportunity might have stayed. Fast friends with Wanda Maximoff, who Donna looked up to like an older sister (or even maternal figure), she relied on their quick bond and friendship as she settled into something like a routine (inasmuch as routine was possible in the City at all, where she experienced her very first zombie apocalypse!). Sirja had her baptism there, performed by an honest-to-God angel (who was less than thrilled by Donna's desire to have Scar stand as Sirja's godfather and nixed the idea hard). Their City Christmas was on a tight budget, but still managed to be memorable. As Hotel California's resident housewife, she was aware of the undercurrents of tension and strange goings on that she didn't have the context to understand - but Donna remained mostly content to take explanations as they were given to her, rather than push for them herself, and generally occupy herself keeping the homefires burning as necessary. Picking some things up just by observation, and by what Wanda would tell her herself, it's probable that how 'well' she took some shocks had to do with a sort of jaded numbness more than being straight up that open-minded. She left the way she came; startled, and by accident. Among the things Donna collected in the City are a stroller personally designed by Tony Stark (it floats, among other things) and protective silver charms crafted by Severus Snape (who warded the apartment she and Sirja waited out the zombie incident in) - not to mention memorable one night stands with the aforementioned professor and James Bond, who probably never expected to find himself on the same bedpost as the Head of Slytherin. Them's the breaks. don't ever want to be somebody else (don't get high) *'Remy LeBeau' Remy, who Donna was already inclined to like, cemented himself firmly in her mind as a belongs-to-Donna person when he invited her to spend Christmas with him and the rest. There aren't really many people that Donna trusts implicitly and Remy isn't, actually, one of them - but he comes pretty close. She thinks he's great and one day he's going to take her down to a casino in a pretty dress and bet her ass. *'James Bond' Once upon a time, in a far away City, a girl named Donna had a hilarious one night stand with James Fucking Bond. Later, in the nexus, she stole his tuxedo jacket with intent to alter it for uses nightclubbing (on the rare occasions in which she actually does that). She should not be permitted to try to catch 'em all, sexy pokemans style. (Donna thinks Bond is charming and hilarious and enjoys trolling him, but probably wouldn't sleep with him again even if he were up for it. The Bond girls that stick around tend to die.) (expand your mind) *'Wanda Maximoff' is like the older sister Donna wished that Elise would have been. Her closest female friend since she drifted through dimensions and misplaced her girls, Wanda is someone that Donna looks up to and loves; she worries about disappointing her and hopes to be someone that Wanda can, in turn, rely on as well. Wanda is currently the only person Donna knows who she does, in fact, trust implicitly. why can't i be the answer that you want? Donnatella is an original character who came about mostly by accident in 2005; her face belongs to Sophia Bush and is used without permission, like these lyrics here from Sarah Fimm's "Be Like Water". I cannot imagine what anyone would want with her, she's a bag of crazy. Donnatella Duvall is indeed an alternate version. Category:Characters Category:Living